The Winthrop University community will have the chance to hear Mulholland’s brave story from the woman herself during the Sept. 26 event, “Freedom to Death Row: The Story of Civil Rights Activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland.”

Mulholland was a student at Duke University when she first joined a sit-in. Pressured by the university’s Dean of Women to stop her activism, she left and, in 1961, joined a Freedom Rider bus down to Mississippi. She was arrested, fined and sent to prison.

After serving her sentence, Mulholland became the first white student to integrate the all-black school Tougaloo Southern Christian College and was also the first white student to be accepted into Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

In 1963 she participated in the famous sit-in at Woolworth's in Jackson, Miss.